


The Sea Has Seen My Like Before

by skoosiepants



Category: Whatever - S. J. Goslee
Genre: Alternative Universe - Sea Serpents, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Sea Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 16:03:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skoosiepants/pseuds/skoosiepants
Summary: Mike has the heart of a predator. He has claws, and teeth like a shark, and slick, sticky toxic skin that fades from white to the color of swamp water at his wrists.Wallace says, “Wow,” when Mike swims ten fins beyond the shoreline. “Wow, I kind of thought you were a mass hallucination.” Wallace’s mid-legs are covered in water, rolling waves lapping at the knobby parts.Mike says, “Are you going to swim out to me?” and Wallace laughs and says, “Fuck no.”“No?”Wallace grins at him and says, “Are you going to drown me again?”Or-Mike sacrifices everything he knows for the man he loves.





	The Sea Has Seen My Like Before

**Author's Note:**

> For InkandOwl, who volunteers to do commissions on my behalf _just because_ , and also for Lissadiane, who, without the slightest hesitation, will look up lizard sex for me.
> 
> This is such a clear departure from the book that I really don’t even think you need to have read it to enjoy this slice of insanity. It’s also ridiculously _heartfelt_ ; I don’t even know how that happened. Also, there is sex, but sadly no lizard sex in this. Title is from Frightened Rabbit.

“God, look at him,” Mike says, resting his chin on his crossed wrists. “With his fucking _legs_.”

Cam knocks him in the head, climbing up over him to see above the rocks. “What, him?” he says. “How can you tell who’s who? They’re all wearing pant-things and the same shirty duffs.”

Mike rolls onto his side to drop Cam back into the water. He goes down laughing, scraping his elbow on the rock face with an, “Ow, fuck.”

“Dick,” Mike says. Cam knows exactly who he’s talking about. He’s tan and tall and has narrow weird feet. He smiles all the time, Mike kind of just wants to punch him in the mouth and then wrestle him into the water and drown him. He’s on the beach every day, searching tide pools at dusk with a small herd of other land-folk, all wearing a shade of green so bright it hurts Mike’s eyes.

Mike huffs and glares at the guy, watching his too-short hair fluff up in the wind. Mike’s hair is _respectable_ —it fans out around his shoulders in the water. Someday Mike’s going to get close enough to touch him. Just when the sun sinks beneath the waves. When the guy can’t see him coming.

He taps his fingers on the rock, absently flicks a scuttling hermit crab into the water, and thinks about all he’ll do to him _then_.

And then Cam shouts “Hey!” at the top of his lungs, pulled up on top of the rocks as far as he can go, the shine of his blue scales thankfully dull in the shadowy sunset, and Mike looks on in horror as the entire herd of land-folk look over at them as one.

“Oh, fuck,” Mike says, as everyone starts shouting.

*

Cam is a fucking dumbass.

“Oh my god,” Mike says, heart pounding, dragging Cam by the wrist through the shallows, shaking off grasping seaweed, accidentally smacking a sea turtle in the face, not bothering to slow down until the cool wash of the open sea envelops them.

He turns, sees Cam’s sharp-toothed grin in the murky water.

His, “What the fuck, Cam?” is justifiably high pitched and squeaky.

“Well,” Cam says, “I figured if I sang him a song of the welcoming embrace of the sea you’d be pissed at me. I was just,” he shrugs, “opening the lines of communication.”

“Opening the—” Mike throws up his hands. “Cam. They’re going to come back with _nets_. With _harpoons_. What if they want to eat us?”

Cam waggles his eyebrows and Mike slaps a hand over Cam’s face, pushing him back with an exasperated yowl.

Cam just says, voice muffled, “Do you think they’ll still come back tomorrow?”

*

The herd does come back the next day. With their same bright green clothes, some with floppy head coverings. None with, thank god, harpoons.

“See,” Cam says cheerily. He nudges Mike’s shoulder hard with his fist. “Now go get closer.”

“Ugh, no,” Mike says. “Fuck off.”

Cam’s quiet for a short, blissful moment and then he says, “What the hell is that? That hairy four-footer?”

Mike follows his gaze and says, “Huh.”

“It looks like an Eight-o Limb, only without the sucker cups and the eight limbs and the,” Cam makes an expansive round gesture with his hands, “squishy head.”

“So not an Eight-o Limb,” Mike says dryly, watching the hairy four-footer jump around the sand, making harsh, loud, air-cracking sounds that make Mike’s head ache. It has a long tongue and pointy ears and it keeps dropping what looks like shells at different land-folk’s feet.

“Do you think _that_ would eat us?” Cam says, only not like he’s worried—more like he wants to go and find out.

And then before Mike can blink Cam is pushing off from the rocks and shimmying through the shallows toward the breakers, and Mike’s too paralyzed with shock to try and stop him.

*

There’s always been four of them, since Mike first spotted them on the beach a month ago. Indistinguishable from a distance, all in the same colors. Mike’s outcropping of rocks is toward the right of them, though, and only fifty fins from where the tide pools form, so he can see the small differences—one with pale skin and long hair streaked with gold, another red-cheeked and long-limbed; there’s big and burly, who frowns a lot, and then Mike’s guy. With his good arm muscles and a loud laugh that makes Mike want to bite a mark on his shoulder join, even though his serrated teeth would probably make him bleed out.

Cam has a solid lead on him once he hits the breakers. Mike is all half panic-stricken and half _furious_ —they’re going to get beached. That hairy four-footer is going to gut them and eat all their entrails.

Mike watches in horror as a wave rolls a whooping Cam just up onto the shoreline. He watches the slap of his blue tail on the sand, the cheery fucking, “Hi!” Cam calls out. The way every single land-folk takes an enormous step away from him _except_ the hairy four-footer.

He thinks about staying hidden in the breakers and letting Cam get himself killed for a bare second before diving forward. He slides up alongside him and tackle-rolls him back into the sea.

The pull of the tide is against them, but Mike jabs at Cam’s ribs and elbows him in the back to get him moving, and then they’re twenty fins out again, Cam red-faced and huffing, “ _Dude_.”

He sweeps his hair out of his face and pouts and says, “I almost touched it!”

“You almost got your arm ripped off,” Mike says, slapping hard at his shoulders. “You almost got _caught_! There’s four of them and a monster, what do you think they do with everything they pick out of those tidal pools, asshole?”

“Eat them?” Cam says, head cocked.

“ _Eat them_ ,” Mike says with a vicious poke to Cam’s chest. And then another one, just to really jab in his point.

And then a voice from behind them says, “Why do you think we’d eat you?” and Mike _does not yelp_ and flail and hit the intruder so hard with his tail that he sort of… sinks into the water without even a sound.

“Oh fuck,” Mike says.

There’s a faint cry of, “Wallace!” from the shoreline.

“I think you killed him,” Cam says, curious. “Should we haul his body back to the beach?”

Mike numbly watches _Wallace_ sink deeper and then sort of flip, so his back floats up, head still under, limbs undulating with the sea rolls.

“Wallace!” someone yells again, closer, and Mike suddenly jerks into motion, hefts the super heavy land-person up so his mouth is open to the air.

“Let go of him,” says Big and Burly, still swimming toward them.

Cam wrinkles his nose and says, “Dude, do you really want him to do that?”

Big and Burly stops at least ten fins away, looking fish pale and pathetic, and Cam pokes at Wallace’s throat, says, “Is he breathing?”

Mike has no idea. Mike, this close to Wallace, wants to drag him down with his own weight, latch onto his arms and hook his tail around Wallace’s…legs? God, he wants—is he thinking of a mating spiral? Is this what is happening? With a _land-person_?

Wallace has dark lashes and soft lips and the skin under his ears is smooth, where his gills should be. He’s wider than Mike and fucking heavy and is completely incapable of living with Mike in his cave without dying a watery death. Shit.

He hastily shoves Wallace at Big and Burly with a snarled, “Go,” baring his sharp teeth.

Big and Burly _growls_ at him.

But then his concern over Wallace must out-weigh any rage at Mike—like he could take Mike in the _sea_ —and he starts pulling Wallace toward the shore.

*

Mike is still coming to grips with the fact that he doesn’t want to kill Wallace—that all his bloodlust has just been his _season_ , what the fuck—when he goes back to the rocks the next day.

He could avoid the area altogether, but that’s Mike’s particular spot, he was there first, and the land-folk can just fuck off.

He’s not at all disappointed when none of them show up.

They don’t show up the next day, or the one after that, or the entire moon cycle.

Cam has stopped coming with Mike because it’s, “boring now,” and Lisa keeps asking him if he’s healthy, and Omar just pats him on the back and gives him the biggest lobster portion and Mike isn’t _sick_ , okay? He’s not suffering from _season fever_ or whatever, which is a _myth_ , and JJ and his flirty yellow tail flip can take his kelp courtship and shove it up his nose.

At night, lying side-by-side in Mike’s cave, Cam says, “Well, you can’t actually mate with him,” but also, “I really want to watch you try.”

Mike says, like he hasn’t been thinking nearly obsessively about it, “It’s a full moon tomorrow night.”

Cam _hmmmms_. He says, “Is it worth it?” and, “What do you think you’d sacrifice?”

Mike holds his hands up in front of his face, spreads his fingers, idly imagines not having any webbing. He shrugs. They’ve heard gruesome tales growing up. Cutting fins and bodies bleeding out. Lost voices, lost limbs.

Mike’s hair floats up around him, smooth, the color of sugar kelp. A silly symbol of worth within the pod. He swoops it to the side and under his head, turning to look at Cam.

“What?” Cam says.

Mike says, “Do you still have that blade from the shipwreck last year?” His season is driving him crazy. His hair will grow back.

*

The full moon passes without any sight of Wallace. Mike broods for days and thinks of Mo, with her red-gold fins billowing around her. Thinks how much easier that would be. But he snaps at Mo and an ever-lurking JJ and hides in the back of his cave, withering away.

“You’re not withering away,” Jay says, looming over him. “No one’s ever died from missing a season.”

It _feels_ like he’s dying.

Jay rolls his eyes. He says, “Well, you have a week before you can try again.”

“And if he’s still not there?” Mike wants to rip Wallace apart and live inside him. The water is nearing the heat-swells of summer, and Mike feels like he’s melting all the time.

“Then you wait and try again, or court someone else, or do absolutely nothing until next year.” Jay is deliberately skipping his season, and Mike thinks it makes him unreasonably smug.

Mike groans and throws his arms over his face.

Jay pokes his side and says, “Do you actually know anything about land-folk?”

“It can’t be hard,” Mike says. He’s sure he can figure it out.

“I hear they don’t have seasons. They just have…”

“Sex?” Mike says, peeking out in between his arms. _All the time_ , he thinks. That’s wild.

Jay’s face is flushed. He says, “Imagine that. Imagine _Cam_ like that.”

Mike says, “I truly do not want to,” and Jay laughs.

*

Four days before the full moon, Wallace comes back. He comes back with Big and Burly and the hairy four-footer and Mike clings to the rocks and watches until the sun sets. Watches him pace on the beach and hunch his shoulders against whatever Big and Burly is saying and when he looks over toward where Mike is waiting, Mike thinks _fuck it_ and raises his hand in a wave.

Wallace stops. His arms fall loose to his sides. He watches, pauses as five breakers crash into the shore, one after the other, before waving back.

The day after that, Wallace is alone.

Mike has the heart of a predator. He has claws, and teeth like a shark, and slick, sticky toxic skin that fades from white to the color of swamp water at his wrists.

Wallace says, “Wow,” when Mike swims ten fins beyond the shoreline. “Wow, I kind of thought you were a mass hallucination.” Wallace’s mid-legs are covered in water, rolling waves lapping at the knobby parts. He’s wearing half-pants and shirty duffs, but neither of them are that hideous bright green.

Mike says, “Are you going to swim out to me?” and Wallace laughs and says, “Fuck no.”

“No?”

Wallace grins at him and says, “Are you going to drown me again?”

“That was an accident.” Mike swims three fins closer. His tail hits the rocky bottom, and he has to flatten out, flipping it above the water line.

Wallace says, awe in his voice, “Your tail looks like a pearl.”

Mike pauses and blinks at him. It’s, honestly, the most flattering thing anyone’s ever said about him to his face. His tail is almost colorless under the ocean.

Wallace has the sky in his eyes and a layer of sparse dark hair all over his arms, his strong legs. If Mike had any doubts left, they’re gone now.

He says, “Three days. Meet here under the full moon, just after the sun goes down.”

“That sounds ominous,” Wallace says, still grinning. “How do I know you’re not going to eat _me_?”

Mike says, “You’ll just have to meet me here and find out.”

*

He starts it right at sunset.

It’s an old ritual. The danger is in repeating it, since each sacrifice after the first one becomes a little bit harder to give.

The hair is a relatively easy choice, even though he has to suffer through trying to cut it himself. He pulls himself up onto his rocks, so only the end of his tail trails into the water. He lifts the somewhat dull blade up to just under his ears and starts sawing. It comes off in thick choppy chunks, and Mike carefully twists each clump of strands around his wrists so he doesn’t lose any. The moon is bright in the sky by the time he finishes. He sees a dark silhouette on the beach, and his breath hitches.

This is it. He’s really going to do this. Shit.

It’s cloudy, and the air is heavy. The moon is a fuzz of light, hidden but bright. Mike carefully binds the hair up in gutweed, turns closed eyes up to the sky, and then tosses his sacrifice to the great whale queen of the sea.

It floats. A pathetic comma of ratty sugar kelp colored hair, a dark shadow in the deepening night. And then in the seconds before Mike starts to panic, the water around it starts to _glow gold_.

It spreads, eating up his hair like a toxin, moving further and further out from the center until it hits Mike’s rock, the end of his tail. Mike grits his teeth to stop a scream, the water frothing against his scales, then climbing upward, _pulling, pulling_ , hot liquid catching tiny hooks into his skin.

This is much worse than lasting out a season alone, Mike thinks, and then everything goes black.

*

He comes to with a dark hulking shape above him, so he can be forgiven the manly shout and thrown fist.

The dark hulking shape says, “Ow, shit,” and Mike realizes the dark hulking shape is actually Wallace. Oops.

The moon is out of clouds. It’s foggy, and disconcertingly bright, and Mike is lying on his back on the beach.

Also, _also_ , his claws are missing. “Huh,” Mike says, lifting his hands up and twisting them, his wrists covered in pale pink skin. He sucks in a breath, feels it whistle down his throat without the wet slap of his gills closing. It’s… odd. As is the smooth skin under his ears, where his gills used to be, and he runs his palms down his chest, over the thick cord of kelp tying the small pouch of belongings around his waist, the cut of his hips, and he only panics a little when he doesn’t hit scales. “Okay,” he says, “So that happened.”

“ _So that happened_?” Wallace echoes in a strangled voice.

Mike is too busy squeezing his legs, though, and cupping the knobby bones that bend them in the middle, to properly parse his expression. He wiggles his feet, notices they’re just as strange looking as Wallace’s. He spreads totally not webbed fingers over the inner ticklish parts of his upper legs and says, “I’m gonna feel weird asking this, but is this my dick?”

Wallace coughs and laughs and makes this horking sound that has Mike worrying about his decision.

Wallace says, “Oh my god.”

Mike says, “It’s a valid question, douchebag, I mostly had, you know…” he trails off with a shrug, and Wallace says, high and shrill, “Fish parts?”

“Uh, no, sea-folk are _not fish_ , what the hell, Wallace?” Mike is a descendent of dragons. His parts just look… different. This one is sort of limp and soft looking and Mike isn’t sure how this is supposed to work. He pokes at it, and Wallace makes a sound like a disgruntled whale.

Wallace says, “Can you stand?”

Mike looks up from his dick and says, “Probably not.” He had strong tail muscles, but these limbs are sore, oddly shaped, and there’s no water around him to help balance his weight. He makes a good effort anyway, though, shifting onto his knobby things—“Knees,” Wallace says, wrapping an arm around his back to help him up.

His touch is infuriatingly warm. Mike doesn’t know why he’s doing this, _god_ , and then he remembers—“Wait, wait,” he says, fumbling awkwardly with his pouch. This is the actual worst, but he shoves a frankly stunning array of purple ribbed fan shells at Wallace and watches him expectantly.

“Uh,” Wallace says, looking down at them. “Thanks?”

So there _could_ be more enthusiasm, but Mike is going to go with it. “So you accept?”

“Sure?” Wallace says, still looking at the shells. Then he jerks his head up. “Wait, what am I accepting?”

“My courting gift,” Mike says, _duh_. Okay, so Mike is not good at courting. He’s only ever had JJ, who has persistently courted _him_ , and Lisa, with mutual _fuck this, lets just do it_ when they decided to spend their first season together, so like… Mike thinks he’s doing this right, but Wallace is a land-person, and land-folk are fucking weird.

Wallace is so close their noses are nearly touching and Mike’s heart is pounding. The kind of pounding he gets when Cam and him go shark chasing, or telling JJ to fuck off, or during that first few moments of a mating spiral, when Mike feels like he’s going to split open and die.

Sea-folk share breath, though, and Mike doesn’t know how to do it without his tail and sharp teeth, but he’s willing to try. They’re so close he reaches out with his oddly thin fingers and cradles Wallace’s face.

Wallace flinches back, catches Mike’s wrists in his hands. He says, hoarse, “What are you doing?”

Mike huffs, heart in his throat. Fuck this; this is _so hard_. “It’s my season, dude, what do you think I’m doing? I thought land-folk had sex all the time.” God, if they were wrong about that Mike is gonna be so pissed.

“Uh.” Wallace has wide eyes and a pretty, parted mouth, it’s giving Mike a stomachache. “No? I mean, yes, but also no. Don’t you think we should date before, uh…?”

Mike makes a face. “What, like, feed each other bladderwrack and crab first?” He’s done that with JJ, but mainly that’s happened _in between_.

“Half of that kind of sounds okay,” Wallace says with a shrug. “Or you could put clothes on, and then we can go see a movie.”

Technically, Mike can stay on land until the next full moon, so long as he doesn’t step back into the sea. He could hang out for a while. “Do you _want_ to see a movie?” He has no idea what that is, but it sounds intriguing.

“I want you to cover up your dick,” Wallace says.

“I don’t know, I’m getting used to it,” Mike says. He goes to poke it again, but Wallace slaps his hand away with, “God, _stop_ ,” and an impressive enough blush to be seen in the hazy moonlight.

Wallace tilts his face up to the sky and says, “Do you want to go to a movie with me or not?”

*

First, they go back to Wallace’s apartment—

“What the fuck is an apartment?”

“I live in it.”

“So like a cave.”

“…sure?”

—which is nothing like a fucking cave, it turns out, but like a giant structure with different levels and separate sections that several different people live in, all together, like weirdos.

Second, Wallace—

“My name is _Rook_ Wallace.”

“So…Wallace.”

“No, that’s… you know what, fine. Do _you_ have a name?”

“No, I’m just a fish.”

“Can we get past that? I mean, if you want to… uh… do…the…”

“…”

“…thing…”

“Ugh, this is _terrible_ , just call me Mike.”

— _Wallace_ makes him put on clothes that, while arguably comfortable, are still kind of restricting.

Wallace slaps a hand over his face and says, “Can you just stop…moving like that? And put on some pants?”

The hem of the top hits Mike’s belly button when he lifts his arms up, it’s _weird_. “Doesn’t this bug you?”

There’s a flush on Wallace’s face when he says, “Kind of. Right now,” and then he blindly throws something soft at him and says, “Pants.”

Man, Wallace is really harping about the pants. Mike misses his tail, and the way no one in the sea cares about nipples.

Third, Mike will never get used to cars.

“This is some sort of rolling death machine,” Mike says, bracing one hand in front of him and clutching the door handle with the other.

Wallace laughs at him.

Mike would be more offended if the sound didn’t make him want to laugh, too. He hides it behind a scowl.

Wallace shoots him a smiling look and says, “Relax, you’re gonna be fine.”

All Mike can think is: this better all be worth it.

*

The movie is loud, bright and _absolutely fascinating_.

“Can we come back tomorrow?” Mike asks as they leave, clutching his half-empty popcorn tub to his chest when Wallace tries to throw it away. He’s eating every single piece, even if he spends all day tomorrow regretting it.

“Uh,” Wallace says, rubbing the back of his neck, and Mike suddenly remembers he’s here for a reason, and hopefully when that reason is over he’ll be flopping back into the sea.

“I mean, no,” Mike says.

Wallace arches an eyebrow at him. “No? No, what?”

Mike shakes his head, says, “Never mind,” and uses his free hand to reel Wallace in close by the front of his shirt. He’s taller than him, it’s vaguely annoying, and Wallace uses all that height to twist away from him and his mouth. Ugh.

“Wait,” Wallace says, tugging down on his top. “You should… sleep. Your legs are,” he looks Mike up and down, expression like he’s accidentally swallowed a sea urchin, “probably tired?”

On the one hand, Mike’s looking forward to getting his _terrible condition_ over with, but on the other he’s hoping there are more fun things on land like movies.

He says, “Do I get to sleep with you?”

“Uh,” Wallace says that _a lot_ , “I can take the couch.”

*

Mike doesn’t know what ‘take the couch’ means, but he does know that Wallace’s bed is the most glorious thing he’s ever slept on, and one summer Cam and him spent three months harvesting enough seagrasses to pad the entire floor of their cave. _That_ had been comfy. This is…

Mike groans, stretching out, and Wallace coughs from the door way and says, “I’ll just…leave you to it.”

“Sure,” Mike says, and then curls up on his side and kicks off his foot cages and all the layers Wallace made him put on and then sprawls face down in what Wallace said was a _pillow_. “I love you, pillow,” Mike says. He wants to sing praises to this pillow in the sunrise, like he’s taking a life-mate in front of his pod.

The whole bed feels warm, and safe, and Mike drifts off to distant shouting, too tired to worry about it.

He wakes up in the morning tingling, and he’s torn between having to go use the bathroom—something he figured out very quickly the night before—and rubbing his front all over the softness under him. Like, is that his _dick_? Is _that_ how that works? His land body is jazzed about this, definitely, it feels amazing, and there’s a great possibility he could be seduced into living this way for the rest of his life. _God_.

Someone knocks on the door and Mike says, “Do you always wake up this way?” and he hears Wallace say, voice maybe pitched a little high, “Breakfast!”

Breakfast is the first meal of the day. Mike usually wakes up and goes clam digging with Cam, so he guesses it’s kind of the same thing.

Mike rolls out of bed and pulls on the soft pants from the night before and thinks about how his dick is noticeably _not_ soft, and also really sensitive, and how his hand feels even better than the mattress. Huh.

And then Big and Burly steps into the doorway and says, “It’s called a boner, fish boy,” and he looks like he would personally like to rip it off Mike’s body.

Mike’s torn between wanting to hide from a fellow, bigger predator and launching himself at Big and Burly’s scowling face. He’s lacking claws, though, and his paralyzing ooze, and his rows of sharp teeth—he settles for staring Big and Burly down until the guy says, jaw clenched, “Your breakfast is getting cold.”

*

Wallace lives near enough to the sea for Mike to smell it as he walks by an open window, but Mike can’t see anything of it.

Wallace also apparently lives with Big and Burly, who is actually named Chris, and he continues to look like he wants to murder Mike all through breakfast.

He bares his stupid blunt teeth at him and says, “So mermaids aren’t fish?”

“If I had my claws you wouldn’t have a throat anymore,” Mike says, eyes narrow.

Wallace says, “Guys, come on. Eat your eggs.”

Mike eats his eggs because they’re good, and Mike is hungry, and not because Wallace is looking at him like Omar does when he’s disappointed in him.

Chris very reluctantly leaves after breakfast, after he turns bright red and starts screaming at Wallace for, “Calling in sick, you _moron_ ,” and then it’s just Wallace and Mike, watching each other over empty plates.

Mike says, “So…” and cocks his head. He runs his tongue over his teeth and stares at the line of Wallace’s throat and wonders how good it would feel to bite him, like this.

“So!” Wallace says, slapping a hand over his neck. “How do you feel about mini golf?”

Mike has no particular feelings about mini golf at first, given that he has no idea what it is, and then when he finds out he is _freaking delighted_.

“This is a fucking nightmare,” he yells joyfully, clubbing a small, brightly colored ball at something called a windmill and watching it ricochet off that and hit some kid in the back. Amazing.

Wallace says, “Huh,” and, “Maybe we should move on to something else,” and then he shows Mike the wonders of bicycles—Mike skins _both_ his knees—and Wallace’s younger brother, Serge.

Serge rocks back on his heels and says, “So you’re the mermaid Rook caught.”

“First, I’m a sea-person,” Mike says, gravely offended. “And second, if anyone caught anyone here, it would be _me_.”

For an instant, Mike thinks Serge is going to be as hostile as Chris about this, but then Serge just shrugs and says, “Okay.”

And then the three of them have hot dogs and ice cream and cheese fries and cheese steaks and then even more ice cream.

Mike goes to bed that night too full to even think about his season, and wakes up to Serge telling him that Wallace had to go back to work for a little while.

Wallace is something called a marine biologist. He works at an aquarium, Serge tells him, and he likes to beach comb in the evenings, and the furry four-footer is actually a dog, and belongs to Serge and Wallace’s youngest sister, Teeny.

They go to an arcade and drink _booze_ and when Wallace comes home he gives them pinched, frowny looks at where they’re sprawled all over the sofa.

“Fuck, Wallace,” Mike says, feeling sort of upside-down, “lighten up. You’re prettier when you smile.”

Wallace just frowns harder, if that’s even possible, but he says, “Call Em to pick you up, Serge,” and then, just to Mike, “ _We_ are going to dinner.”

*

It goes on like that. This hanging out and no touching and Mike might look like a land-person and eat like a land-person and sleep in a gloriously soft bed like a land-person, but he’s still, technically, a sea-person coming up on the tail end of his season, and just growing more and more frustrated.

In a few months the heat-swells will turn into the dark, sluggish, sleepy times spent at the back of caves, feasting on scuttles and stars. Mike doesn’t want all this to be for nothing. His hair may grow back, but it’ll never be the same.

A week before the next full moon, Mike stops Wallace in the doorway of his bedroom with a hand on his arm and says, “What are you—what are _we_ doing?”

Wallace looks down at Mike’s fingers. He lifts his hand, like he’s going to cover them with his own, but he aborts halfway there and scratches his chin instead. “Uh. What?”

Mike sighs. “Look, there’re weird things I’ve mastered in the bathroom, okay? And I appreciate all you’re showing me here, like lamps and TVs and mattresses and steak and dogs,” Mike could go on, but Wallace is looking a little strained around the eyes, “but I have no idea what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing,” Wallace repeats flatly.

“Us,” Mike waves a hand back and forth between them, “what are we doing?”

“Do sea-folk not… date like this?” Wallace asks tentatively.

Mike shrugs, shoulders tense. There’s courtship leading up to seasons, and grouping together for warmth during cold swells, and whatever weird codependent exploring thing Cam and Deanna do that doesn’t involve Mike—that Mike isn’t bitter about _at all_ —and sometimes JJ will bite the back of his shoulder, if Mike isn’t paying enough attention to him… he doesn’t know if any of that counts.

“But,” Mike says, face hot, “if we’ve been dating all this time, I’m pretty sure,” according to all the TV and movies Mike has watched, at least, “we should definitely be having sex now.”

Wallace sucks in a breath. He takes a step toward him, gaze intent. “And that’s what you want?” he asks.

Mike rolls his eyes, tries to look more nonchalant than he actually feels. Seasons aren’t usually this fucking awkward. He’s had time to simmer. He says, “That’s pretty much what I’ve always wanted.”

“Okay,” Wallace says.

Standing this close together, Mike has to tilt his head to look Wallace in the face. “Okay?”

Wallace’s big hands cup Mike’s cheeks, and Mike’s heart starts pounding. There are bubbles bursting across the base of his spine, his skin feels tight, itchy, and his breath hitches, and then hitches again, and then…

“Mike, hey, Mike,” Wallace says, drawing him closer, intent look melting into concern. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” Mike manages, only he has no fucking idea what he’s doing. His body is… nothing here is the same.

“Right.” Wallace arches an eyebrow of deep skepticism. His hands slip off Mike’s face, down his chest before curling around his hips, grip keeping him steady. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“Fuck off,” Mike says weakly. He drops his forehead onto Wallace’s shoulder. “God, freak out a little about your _totally new parts_ and suddenly you’re fucking _fragile_.”

Wallace’s breathing is steady and his shirt is soft. Mike takes big gulps of breaths that become smaller and smaller as Wallace rubs a hand up and down his spine.

“Sorry,” Mike says finally.

“You’re fine,” Wallace says.

“Duh,” Mike says, but he doesn’t move away. He lifts hands to grip Wallace top, tugs the hem up so he can slip his hands underneath, spreading fingers over his warm skin. “Try again?”

“How about we start with something easy,” Wallace says. He presses the curl of his knuckles against Mike’s chin to tip his face up, and then leans down to touch their mouths together.

Mike has done this. Has shared breath, sealing up gills just long enough to make him dizzy, but this is more. This is Wallace’s teeth tugging hard at Mike’s lip without tearing, his tongue licking into Mike’s mouth without getting sliced in half.

Mike goes after him when he pulls away, panting hard—he grips the back of Wallace’s neck and yanks and swipes his own tongue across Wallace’s lips until he lets him, too.

When Mike’s mouth feels sore and swollen and his heart feels like it’s trying to climb up his throat, he finally lets Wallace go. He staggers back and collapses on the bed—he can’t believe they were standing _that entire time_ —and Wallace laughs, breathily, and follows him down.

Mike spreads out on his back, chest rapidly rising and falling, entire body tingling, and Wallace tugs impatiently at his shirt, says, “Mike, c’mon,” in a near-murmur, and makes him move his arms to get it up and over his head. When he reaches for the waistband of Mike’s pants, hot fingers curling into his belly, Mike’s finally clearheaded enough to help.

He growls, “Clothes are so fucking stupid,” as he grapples with the fastenings on Wallace’s pants, and Wallace says, “Easy, easy,” as the teeth of the zip open up over his dick—his _hard_ dick, god.

Mike squirms and says, “How the fuck do we do this?” even as Wallace gets a grip on both of them, _together_ , and Mike arches up into his hand with a yowl.

Wallace’s grimace is all teeth, but his eyes are lit up, and he says, “Like this,” and, “Oh, _fuck_.”

Wallace’s knuckles slide across Mike’s stomach, knuckles digging in with every flex and bow of Mike’s body, every twist of Wallace’s hand.

“Fuck,” Mike says, “Oh my god,” and then Wallace says, “I think we can do better.”

*

Better is apparently Wallace’s fingers, first, and Mike clamps his thighs on either side of Wallace’s shoulders, cursing under his breath as Wallace presses slick, thick digits _inside_.

“How do mermaids do this?” Wallace asks, letting up from licking Mike’s dick to shoot him a sly little grin.

Mike digs his heel into Wallace’s back and says, “Fuck you, I’m a dragon,” voice ending on a high note as Wallace’s fingers brush something incredibly sensitive, sparks spangling across his ass and up his spine. “ _What the fuck_.”

Wallace smiles wider and bites at Mike’s hip and _does it again_. He says, “You don’t _look_ like a dragon,” and slowly drags his fingers out.

Mike slumps into the mattress, trembling. He covers his face with his arms to hide watering eyes and says, “My ancestors took out entire floating armies, asshole.”

The fingers slide back in, wider now, and Wallace says, “Oh. Like a sea serpent. A _monster_.”

“Are you _trying_ to make me mad?” Mike says, hands clenched in the sheets on either side of his head, tense at the burn and thinking about crying.

“Maybe,” Wallace says, and there’s a smile and tease in his voice.

Mike huffs a laugh. “Asshole,” he says, and gasps when Wallace wiggles one of his fingers. “ _Fuck_.”

Wallace sucks bruising kisses along Mike’s hipbone, hooks an arm under Mike’s right leg and then pushes up, bites higher along Mike’s side, and murmurs, “Relax, relax,” when Mike hisses.

Dropping his arms to his sides, Mike says, “This is torture. This is slow painful death, Wallace, _do something_.”

“I am,” Wallace says. “Don’t worry.”

Mike’s _normal_ seasons, Mike’s mating spirals, are instinct. There’s the locking bite, the intertwined tails, blurry pleasure, a burning hunger so deep they just barely refrain from ripping each other apart before the end. They come out the other end bloody and sated and fuzzy on details.

Mike’s clear on these details. He’s clear on the way it hurts, kind of, and how Wallace has to clamp onto his hips to keep him from scrambling away. He feels every single inch of him nudging him apart, Wallace sweaty and red-faced above him, jaw clenched and eyes far-away blue, like he can see into Mike’s chest, see his lungs seizing and his heart swelling with every too-loud beat.

Mike is wheezing, tears dripping down to pool in his ears, and Wallace stops moving every other second to tell him, “Wait,” and, “God fucking damn it, relax,” like it does anything other than make Mike tense back up again even worse.

“Okay, okay,” Wallace says, sounding winded and hoarse. He says, “This isn’t working,” and goes to pull out and Mike panics and clenches his legs around him to stop him.

“No, _no_ ,” Mike says. “Just, fucking, wait a minute.”

Wallace pauses. He slumps down over Mike, careful to keep his hips still. He leans his arms on either side of Mike’s face and says, “Sorry.”

Mike slams a weak fist into his side before spreading his fingers out over his slick back. He thinks about breathing until his breath evens out, and when he squirms under Wallace, Wallace chokes back an interesting little cry.

Mike hitches his hips up and Wallace sinks in deeper. He watches Wallace’s face, eyes closed, mouth dropped stupidly open, strands of his dark hair stuck flat to his forehead. He trails a hand down Wallace’s back, rests it at the top of his ass, and then hitches his hips up again.

“Fuck, fucking, _sorry_ ,” Wallace says, “I have to—” and then he sinks all the way down inside.

Mike tenses up again, briefly, at the way it’s both excruciating and _wonderful_ , and then Wallace is panting into his throat, making hurt noises, and Mike climbs his legs up his sides until Wallace gets the fucking picture and hooks his arms under his knees and forces them up _even higher_.

Mike is open and helpless to do anything but kick at Wallace to make him thrust harder, and it’s possible that this is the best goddamn season Mike has ever had.

*

Mike wakes up with a burn under his skin that isn’t normal for just after a mating spiral, but might be normal for land-folk who don’t have seasons.

He’s _alone_ , though, and that’s tragic.

He stretches and groans into his pillow and thinks about breakfast, and not about how cold the other side of the bed feels.

At a knock, he jerks his head up to see Chris standing awkwardly in the doorway. It’s the first time Mike hasn’t seen him scowling. He clears his throat and says, “Wallace left food for you in the kitchen,” and then wanders away.

So. Wallace… left for work. Without telling him. That’s fine.

He takes his time in the shower, skimming hands over red marks on his hips, his thighs, a blush high in his cheeks. He thinks about doing it again, later, and is strangely more embarrassed by this weird land body than he was before. He shakes it off, though, and then gets dressed and heads to the kitchen to see a plate on the stove with a paper towel draped over it.

Rubbing a hand absently over his chest, he finds himself smiling for no reason at all.

And then he sees the note.

It’s… Mike’s pod uses more than a few land-folk words that they’ve picked up over the years, but Mike can’t really read land-writing. He can see _Mike_ and _you_ and _bye_ , though, and he crumples the note up in his fist. Something inside him has betrayed him. He feels… bad. His belly swoops into sadness and then he squares his shoulders and comes out the other end furious.

Stomping down the hall, he bangs on Chris’s door and shoves the paper into his chest when it swings open.

Chris gingerly takes it from him. He eyes the note and then Mike’s face, and says, strangely tentatively, “Do you need a ride?”

“No,” Mike says tightly, ignoring the prickling at the corners of his eyes. “I need you to tell me what the fuck it says.”

Chris looks pityingly at him with a lopsided half-smile. He says, “C’mon. I’ll give you a ride.”

*

Chris is an asshole and Wallace is a douchebag and Mike presses his forehead into the car window and doesn’t even bother to hold on as they take the winding roads back down to the beach. He fingers the note, brushes his thumbs across the words over and over again. The words that don’t even say _I’ll miss you_ , Chris told him. That don’t even say, _Please stay_.

His chest feels hollow. The words Wallace did write— _It was nice having met you, maybe I’ll get to see you again_ , and _goodbye_ —do nothing to ease the ache behind his eyes, the itch under his skin. He’s not in love with Wallace. That would be stupid. Love is for family and for life-mates and _forever_.

Wallace was only ever supposed to be a season.

“You could stay,” Chris says when he rolls to a stop in the beach lot.

Across from them is the ocean, endless and deep. Mike can taste the water in the back of his throat, the pressure on the side of his neck where his gills should be, and he clenches and unclenches his hands into fists on his thighs.

Mike says, almost numb, “They say it might be permanent. If you stay past the next full moon.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the breakers, the mid-morning sun glinting off rolling waves, sprays hitting the rocks where he’d hid, spying on Wallace on the beach.

He laughs a little at himself, thinking he would have done it, would have tried to stay. When he first woke up that morning, he would have done it, if Wallace had asked. He would have done it if he’d wrote it down, even: _Please stay_.

But he didn’t ask. Or write it. And that’s better, that’s good, because Mike’s insane for even thinking that would be an okay thing to do.

He’s got his family, and he’s got Cam, he’s got his friends.

Up here he doesn’t have anything at all.

Chris turns off the car engine. He says, “You could come back,” and Mike finally looks at him—this guy who’s hated his guts for weeks, and is now looking at Mike carefully, like he’s watching him breaking apart. God. How fucked up is that?

Mike doesn’t tell Chris he can’t. Doesn’t say he’d have to find another sacrifice, one even more precious than his hair, and that each time after that it would be worse—slicing himself down to nothing, all for the sake of… what? A fuck?

He takes a shuddering breath and says, “Maybe,” and then he gets out of the car.

*

It takes nearly four days for Mike’s sixteen year old brat of a sister to work it out.

She says, “You left for over three weeks on some sort of seasonal grand tour and came back looking like Cam finally got murdered by Jules. You’re in love.”

“Ugh, no,” Mike says, flipping over so he’s face down on the hard rock floor of his cave. “You have never been more wrong.”

“I have _never_ been wrong,” Rosie says.

Mike’s too tired to point out all the ways that’s complete bullshit.

“Stop moping,” she says, chucking a shell at him. “Go lurk on the rocks. Cam says he comes back, you know. Every day so far.”

Mike doesn’t want hear that. He doesn’t want to _know_. He peeks up at her and says, “How does he look?”

She has her hands on her hips, hair a mass of swirling curls, tangled with seaweed and smooth stones, spiral shells, and two of her favorite hermit crabs. She frowns and says, “Just as pathetic as you, probably.”

“But you don’t know for sure,” Mike says.

“Cam knows. _You’d_ know if you bothered to swim out of this cave.” She dives forward and tugs on the uneven strands of his hair haloing out around his head. She says, “It’s lighter now, from the sun.”

Mike bats her hands away. “Leave me be.” It feels weird, having the water lap over his exposed neck all the time, he keeps feeling phantom brushes of his hair all over his arms and back.

Rosie harrumphs but leaves with a flick of her iridescent tail, and Mike stares up at the murky ceiling of his cave. It’s different, moving now. Relearning his shape, the raw newness of his gills, toxins burning into his skin from the inside, slow and patchy, still land-folk pink in places. His teeth feel too much, and he keeps cutting into his lips by accident. It’s fucking ridiculous. He hates it.

He hates how much he misses Wallace more.

Cam comes over later with a handful of scuttles and Mike listlessly eats one, listening to Cam talk about Deanna and how Meckles hid his season out in the old shipwreck fifty fins down the coast— _typical_ —and how Lisa is courting Larson now— _bleh_ —and how Omar and Jules are thinking about having a life-mate ceremony, and—how are they all this old? That they’re doing that now?

Mike feels like he should be doing more with his life than hunting with Cam and spying on land-folk and hiding from his sister.

“Cam,” Mike says, “do you know what you’re doing with your life?”

“Fuck, dude, maybe?” Cam shrugs with a loose grin. “Dee probably has a plan for me. Maybe head south, where it’s all warm swells all the time.”

Sea-folk aren’t generally migrant, Mike’s spent his entire life in the same cove, but pods wouldn’t survive without welcoming new blood, and saying goodbye to some old.

“Would you ever want to walk on land?” Mike asks.

“Never say never,” Cam says, waving a hand, “but all I want and love is right here.” He gives Mike an unnaturally shrewd look. “Is this about your guy? Dude, just go see him.”

Mike scowls. “He told me to leave.”

“So? Weren’t you gonna leave anyhow?” Cam nudges their arms together. “I still think he wants to see you. He sits out on our rocks every day.”

“Our rocks?” Mike immediately thinks of all the ways that could go wrong—they’re slippery, and too far out when the tide rolls in, and too sharp-edged for Wallace’s delicate land-folk skin.

He swims out of the cave before he can think twice about it, cutting a swift path through the murky deep, the trench, and bursts up out of the water just before the breakers. The sun is directly overhead, reflecting blindingly over the surface—it’s far too early for Wallace to be anywhere near the beach, and yet… there he is.

Mike’s breath catches.

Wallace looks _horrible_. Something deep in Mike’s chest loosens at the sight of him, a hunched figure, knees up and hands dangling. He doesn’t notice Mike. He’s staring into the spray of water as it lashes the rocks. He looks soaked and resigned, and Mike’s frozen, watching him.

It’s been four fucking days. God.

He must make a sound—a splash, a harsh, hurt noise in the back of his throat—and Wallace suddenly looks up at him. Their eyes catch, and Mike pushes backward with his tail, makes more distance between them. He can’t do this. He doesn’t even know why Wallace is _there_.

Wallace shouts, “Wait,” but Mike doesn’t—he dives.

And then motherfucking goddamn Wallace dives in _after him_.

He’s a swimmer, normally, Mike knows that much about him. But not when he’s half dead with exhaustion, pummeled between rocks in the trench, and there’s already a cut above his eye when Mike reaches him, a visible struggle for breath as all his damn clothes drag him down.

“What the fuck, Wallace?” Mike says, grabbing for his arms and yanking him upward—they break the surface and Wallace gasps and coughs and leans onto Mike’s shoulder and says, “You wouldn’t talk to me. I needed to get your attention.”

“By _drowning_?” Mike yells.

Wallace laughs wetly into his throat. “I figured you’d save me. And if you didn’t, well,” he shrugs, spreading out rings of water, “I was miserable without you, anyway.”

“That’s terrible, oh my god. You’re a fucking idiot.” But Mike wraps his arms around Wallace, careful of his claws and skin, and starts pulling him toward the shore.

*

Wallace kneels in the water, waves breaking around him, and says, “I didn’t mean it.”

Mike is ten fins out, tail brushing the rocky bottom. He says, “Didn’t mean what?”

“For you to leave,” Wallace says, and Mike shakes his head and says, “It doesn’t matter. I would’ve had to leave anyhow.”

It’s not a lie, but it feels like one.

Wallace nods slowly though. “Chris told me. He said if you’d stayed past the full moon, you probably couldn’t go back at all.”

“That’s what they say,” Mike says. There are no hard truths. Mike doesn’t know anything for sure, because he’s never met anyone who’s actually gone ahead and done it. Mike’s the first one in their pod to use the sacrifice in a few generations—they’re all more legends now, or rumors from other pods.

Wallace stares at him. He licks his lips and fidgets with his wet shirt, and Mike takes in the small silvery scar at the corner of his left eye, the thin watery blood at his hairline, the hairy scruff all over his jaw, the way his mouth twitches, fighting a frown, and how his eyes dart around Mike’s face, upper body, arms.

Mike asks, “Why did you tell me to leave if you didn’t want me to go?”

“I thought… you’d gotten what you came for. What you wanted,” Wallace says. “I thought you were supposed to leave.”

Mike isn’t going to argue the point. It’s true—it’s baldly, horrifyingly true. Except fuck what he was _supposed_ to do. You don’t go on land for a season. You go on land for an _adventure_. And the funny thing is Wallace kind of showed him all that, too.

Wallace says, voice low, “Can you come back?” The _to me_ is silent but obvious, and makes Mike’s eyes sting.

Because Mike doesn’t know. Even if he waited endless moon cycles for his hair to grow back—that wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice anymore. Mike doesn’t think he has anything left worth giving. He _doesn’t know_.

“I wish,” he says thickly.

The sun is still high and hot, dazzling across the water. When Wallace nods, though, and pushes up onto shaky legs, Mike’s vision grows fuzzy watching him walk out of the water, and it suddenly feels like darkfall.

*

Lisa gets fed up with Mike’s mood an astounding three days later. She rolls him off the ledge of his cave and says, “Your mom would kill me if I let you die here.”

If he died, would the great whale queen lift his body out of the sea? Would that be a good sacrifice?

“Oh my god, I can tell you’re being stupid about this,” Lisa says, because Lisa has always been a freaky mind reader. “Both of you are such melodramatic assholes, you deserve each other.”

Mike says, “I want him and I can’t have him.”

She looms above him, hands on her hips. Her green side-fins fan out like a ray. “ _Why_?”

Mike throws out his arms. “What would I give? Tell me Lisa, what could I possibly give up here for him?”

Lisa gives him a hard look. She leans forward and cups his face in her hands; glides closer until their noses are nearly touching. “Would you give up us?”

“Would I…?” Mike flinches back, out of her grip. “What kind of question is that?”

“A hard one,” Lisa says.

Mike stares at her, and then down at his hands, picking at the webbing between his fingers. “What kind of question is that?” he says again, softer. And then, “Why would that even work? I sacrificed my hair for unending days up there.”

“You sacrificed your _status_ —”

Mike makes a face.

“—which is nearly obsolete in these times anyway, Michael, _don’t give me that look_. I know you haven’t seen JJ lately but he cut all of his off almost to his skull, his father was furious! And you did that for only for a moon cycle. The sea would have called you back.” She presses a hand over both of his, stilling his fingers. “You couldn’t have stayed.”

Mike scowls and says, “How do you know that?”

Lisa rolls her eyes. “Research, Michael. Something you probably should have done before impulsively calling on the great whale queen with absolutely no idea what you were doing.”

“It turned out okay,” Mike says petulantly, and Lisa just stares at him in disbelief.

Finally, she says, “The sacrifices get harder for a _reason_.”

Mike clenches his jaw and ignores the burn in his throat.

She says, “There’s only one way to stay out there forever. If that’s what you really want to do.”

Mike has no idea. How can he know how he’ll feel months from now? Years? “But I wouldn’t be able to come back?”

She laughs a little, swallowed by a small, pained sound, and for the first time Mike notices the strain around her eyes. “Well, if it was easy,” she says, “we’d all be doing it.”

*

Mike has no fucking clue what he should do.

Cam says, “Okay, weigh the good and bad, dude.”

“Right,” Mike says. They’ve got their tails curled together, sitting at the bottom of a broken piece of boat, a shipwreck teetering on the edge of the trench.

“The bad, you won’t have your tail. The good,” Cam immediately adds on, eyebrows waggling, “you didn’t seem to miss it very much the first time.”

Mike would argue, but it’s mostly true. He tilts his head and says, “Good thing, Wallace. Bad thing, his friend, Chris. And then there are dogs, and popcorn and phones and pizza and _Serge_.” He flops down on his back, arms spread. This is so fucking hard.

Cam pokes under his arm, making him squirm, and says, “Lots of folk leave their pods, Mike. You gotta make your own way in the world.”

“What about Rosie? And my mom?” Mike gets an ache behind his heart just thinking about never seeing his sister again.

Cam shrugs. “Surface chats,” he says, like that’s the same thing as all the cold swells they spent curled up together for. Never mind the fact that Mike hasn’t slept in his mom’s cave for years. It’s the _never again_ that keeps tripping him up.

“I don’t know,” Mike says.

“You could wait until Dee and I leave, or you could wait until Rosie starts her first season,” Cam says reasonably, “but do you think _Wallace_ would wait.”

“Do you not understand what forever means, Cam?” Mike feels like tearing what’s left of his hair out. “Forever, out there, with no idea what I’m doing!”

“I don’t know, dude,” Cam says. “You never seem to know what you’re doing here, either.”

“ _Fuck_ you,” Mike says, viciously, but Cam just says, “I’m right, you know I’m right,” and Mike rubs his palms into his eyes and barks out a harsh laugh and says, “Yeah, well, fuck you anyway.”

Cam pats his back and says, “I’m gonna be cheesy as fuck, man, but follow your heart.”

*

It would be easier, maybe, if Wallace didn’t come back. If he didn’t bring his sisters— _Lil and Teeny_ —and the dog— _Elizabeth_ —and if he didn’t swim out to the rolling swells and stare at him, and tell him he misses him, and just generally completely fuck with Mike’s life. God.

“You’re a fucking menace,” Mike says, and Wallace just grins.

It goes on until the air gets icy and the temperature drops, and then Wallace sits on the beach in thick clothes and head coverings, and has to shout to be heard, and Mike starts thinking about nesting for the cold swells, curling tails with his friends in the back of his cave. And he thinks about how lonely that feels, now.

It’s well past sundown, the full moon low, burning orange through the water. He’s one of the last ones to turn in—hovering in the bleak cave opening, body slow and sleep-heavy and yet somehow still fucking restless.

Rosie comes up behind him and yawns into his shoulder. She says, “I’m gonna miss you.”

She wraps her arms around him and he relaxes into her hold, bows his head and feels the press of her cheek on his nape. Fuck, he’s really gonna do this. He says, hoarse, “I’m gonna miss you, too.”

He wakes everyone up to say goodbye. He gets hugged more times than he deems appropriate, and his mom calls him, “Sweetheart,” and pets his weird short hair, and presses the family crest into his hands, a stone spiral, the heart of a dragon.

“This should be Rosie’s,” Mike says, fingers curled tight around it, rough edges biting into his skin.

She tilts their foreheads together and says, “Wherever you are. If you need me, I’ll find you,” and Mike feels like his heart is cracking open.

“I can’t do this,” he says.

“Sure you can,” she says, stern but warm. “ _Of course_ you can. If you weren’t going to miss us, then it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.”

Mike doesn’t look back when he swims away. He breaks the surface near his rocks. Moonlight softens the shadows, and it’s so cold Mike can see his breath. He drags himself up out of the water. Clutching the crest to his heart he thinks: _god-fucking-damn it_.

He thinks: _I’m giving up my whole life here, right?_

He swipes at his cheeks and thinks: _I really hope I don’t have to say this shit out loud for it to work._

And then he thinks: _this is going to really fucking hurt_.

In more ways than he can even imagine.

When the whale-song rings through the air, eerie in the frost, it seems like the whole entire sea burns gold.

*

Mike wakes up aching all over, with several rocks digging into his back and who he’s pretty sure is Chris standing over him. His face is in shadow, but Mike bets he’s wearing an impressive scowl.

He says, “Yeah, I found something of yours on the beach, you might want to come pick it up,” and it takes Mike an embarrassingly long moment before he realizes Chris is talking on his phone.

Mike says, “Asshole,” and, “You could help me up first, you know,” even though he’s not entirely sure he can move any of his limbs. It feels worse than before. It could be because it’s _supposed_ to feel worse, or because he’s fucking freezing.

“It’s not my fault you did this without letting anyone fucking know about it. Jesus, Mike. What the fuck?” Chris sounds only a little concerned, and he drops his sweatshirt onto Mike’s face. “You’re going to freeze to death, and then I’m gonna have to tell Wallace that you’re a fucking idiot.”

“I’m not going to freeze to death,” Mike says, voice muffled by the material as he pulls it over his head. Then he cocks his head at Chris and says, “Why are _you_ here?”

Chris’s jaw clenches and he stares at the ground. “It’s the full moon.”

“It is,” Mike says, still bewildered.

Chris sighs and throws up his hands and says, “Yeah, well, _somebody_ had to fucking wait around for your ass to get it together.”

“You, uh…what?”

“I don’t know, Mike, maybe I’m an optimist.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Or maybe I was just trying to figure out a way to murder you for breaking my best friend’s heart.”

The sound of gravel crunching, the rumble of an engine, the slice of headlights across the sand, have Mike’s heart jumping up into his throat. This could be a disaster. It’s only Chris’s weirdly calming presence that gives him any kind of hope.

Chris helps him stand, wonder of wonders, and helps him pick his way unsteadily over the jetty of rocks, down to the pocket of wet sand that leads over to the beach. Wallace is standing in the middle of it by then—he’s barefoot, sleep-worn, with messy hair. He’s got a wide-open stance, despite being in short sleeves, wind off the water billowing out his loose clothes behind him.

“Mike,” he says.

“Wallace,” Mike says gravely.

Wallace takes a step toward him. “What did you do?”

“Probably something stupid,” Mike says. Something _amazing_.

Wallace takes two steps more. “Is this… another month?”

Mike can’t make his feet move, even though Chris shoves him in the middle of the back. He stumbles and stands up straighter and says, “Uh, no.”

“Less than that?” Wallace says, expression falling, and Mike covers his face and says, “No, _more_.”

And then Wallace is directly in front of him and tugging on his wrists, eyes wide and incredulous. He presses Mike’s hands to his chest and says, “More? Mike, do you mean—”

“Forever,” Mike shrugs tightly, but lets Wallace keep his hands, “if you’ll have me.”

Chris says, “Jesus _Christ_.”

Wallace says, “Mike,” and, “Fuck,” and Chris says, “Jesus, this is my _nightmare_ ,” and then Wallace is kissing him.

Mike feels like his whole world is right and wrong at the same exact time. He curls his fingers into the front of Wallace’s shirt and holds on.

When Mike can breathe again, when he can think without wanting to rub his entire body all over Wallace’s, and he can ignore his dick, mostly, in favor of closing his eyes against the warmth of Wallace’s throat, he says, “Take me home.”

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes I write stuff on [tumblr](https://pantstomatch.tumblr.com/)


End file.
